WORK
Sam Chamberlain
EXHIBITION 4-19 DECEMBER 2009
BEING ON THE EDGE OF TIME 1994 acrylic and paper collage on board 50 x 38 cm
"Sam Chamberlain describes mental as well as physical environments. His paintings and collages use material forms to encapsulate and frame the transcendent world that is the true subject of his vision, forming relationships between the places of the planet and the places of the mind.
These are images that ask the viewer not only to look again, but to think again: about what is and what isn't, about what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore, about the nature of visual reality and the myriad unseen possibilities that exist alongside the consensual, agreed version of the everyday world.
The full force of the human experience is ever-present in this compelling collection. It's in the primal, sometime primitive accumulation and manipulation of fabric, board and paint. It's in the relentless, supremely organic energy of the brush, blade and glue executions. We find it especially in the almost manic, often humorous, always mysterious and occasionally menacing relationships that Chamberlain constructs and presents between foreground and background. These opposed 'locations', the 'front' and the 'back' of the image, are not just physical or mathematical. They can be interpreted to equal effect and value as 'first glance and second glance', 'higher and the lower mind', 'inner and outer reality'.
Chamberlain's work, demonstrates extraordinary dynamism, immediacy and originality. Stately, static, sometimes abstracted still lifes and representative
(or at least recognisable) landscapes are literally undercut, simultaneously underwritten and undermined with and by glimpses of the blurred frenzy that seethes beneath. We are witnessing explicit depiction, approaching description, of the two lives we all live: in public and in private, consciously and unconsciously, and very possibly in and out of control."
Dominic Collier - writer and poet- London 2009
SHE WALKS IN FLOWERS 2009 acrylic and paper collage on board 85 x 59 cm
DAISIES 1994 acrylic and paper collage on board 43 x 38 cm
BULL 2008 pencil and pastel on paper 29 x 23 cm
BIRD 2009 pencil and pastel on paper 21 x 29 cm
BORDELLO 1989 mixed media collage on board 30 x 24 cm
FALL, FOWL, LIZARDS 2009 acrylic and papyrus collage on board 85 x 59 cm